We have explained before how men­tal stim­u­la­tion is impor­tant if done in the right sup­port­ive and engag­ing envi­ron­ment. Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky and oth­ers’ have shown that chron­ic stress and cor­ti­cal inhi­bi­tion, which may be aggra­vat­ed due to imposed men­tal stim­u­la­tion, may prove coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Hav­ing the right moti­va­tion is essen­tial.

A promis­ing area of sci­en­tif­ic inquiry for stress man­age­ment’ is Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR).’ You may have read about it in Sharon Begley’s’ Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain’ book. An increas­ing num­ber of neu­ro­sci­en­tists (such as UMass Med­ical School’s Jon Kabat-Zinn and Uni­ver­si­ty of Wisconsin-Madison’s Richard David­son) have been inves­ti­gat­ing the abil­i­ty of trained med­i­ta­tors to devel­op and sus­tain atten­tion and visu­al­iza­tions and to work pos­i­tive­ly with pow­er­ful emo­tion­al states and stress through the direct­ed men­tal process­es of med­i­ta­tion prac­tices. And have put their research into prac­tice for the ben­e­fit of many hos­pi­tal patients through their MSBR pro­grams.

A Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gist and friend recent­ly alert­ed me to a sim­i­lar pro­gram orga­nized by the Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion. She writes that “there are some real­ly inter­est­ing sci­ence find­ings. The main one is that: cor­ti­sol lev­els decrease after prac­tic­ing the Sudar­shan Kriya (the breath­ing tech­nique you will learn) and, over time, the base­line cor­ti­sol lev­els keep decreas­ing so, some­one who has been prac­tic­ing for a num­ber of years, for exam­ple, walks around with much low­er cor­ti­sol lev­els than a reg­u­lar per­son.’ Also, stud­ies on patients with can­cer and depres­sion have shown a marked increase in self-report­ed well-being. The course is now being taught in places of trau­ma such as Iraq and hard-core pris­ons in the US and all over the world.”

About SharpBrains

As seen in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, CNN, Reuters and more, SharpBrains is an independent market research firm tracking health and performance applications of brain science.